We didn’t have time to see the casket, but we did see the people lining up for the viewing–the backdrop for Couric’s makeshift outdoor set. Reagan, of course, was more responsible than anyone else for the end of communism, a system among whose lesser horrors were that it forced people to spend much of their lives in queues for such necessities as food and toilet paper. Somehow then it seems a fitting tribute that thousands of free men and women would voluntarily wait in line to pay their last respects.
I’m watching the ceremony as the casket is being taken down the Capitol steps, and the cannons firing on the mall, and just thinking about how embarrassing it would be if they screwed up and put real loads in them, and took out a few government buildings.
Somehow, considering who it was in honor of, it would have been fitting, especially if they were pointing south toward HHS. If I ever get a state funeral, that would be one of my requests. They’d need a little more range, but I might have them target a certain building over on E Street, too.
Andrew Sullivan has a nice collection of foolish quotes about Reagan from the eighties. This one in particular caught my eye:
“Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we’re going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying,
Krogers and the Perkins restaurant chain are taking down their idiotic “Please Come In And Rob The Disarmed Victims In Our Establishment” signs in Ohio.
In a letter announcing the removal of the signs, Marc Teaberry, the executive vice president of Perkins Family Restaurants, noted that the restaurant chain has “numerous locations in Pennsylvania, which has always had a concealed weapon law, and have never had any problems.” Teaberry added that the company, in posting the signs, had received “bad advice” from its attorneys.
That’s putting it mildly.
Ohioans For Concealed Carry said it also has received reports that Kroger stores in the Cincinnati Division (which includes greater Dayton) had begun removing their “no guns allowed” signs.
“It is not yet known if this action is in any way related to the assault and robbery of a 70-year old Kroger customer outside a posted store on May 23,” Ohioans For Concealed Carry said in a press release.
We are very happy that the coup failed because we have now really destroyed the communist empire, the Soviet state, and of course, as
Ronald Reagan said, it was indeed an evil empire and we are glad that it
is gone from the earth.
– Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin Foreign Minister, speaking to ABC’s Sam Donaldson, after the communist hard-liners coup attempt failed in 1991.